At 11:04am ET, NBC News cut in to regular programming for the second NBC News Special Report on coverage of the public release of the Mueller Report, anchored by Lester Holt and Savannah Guthrie. They were joined by NBC News’ Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell, in addition to Justice Correspondent Pete Williams and others (see below).
President Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow spoke with NBC News following the release of the report. The second report ended at 12:25pm ET.
NBC News Justice Correspondent Pete Williams to Lester Holt:
“I am just going to say – we should think about how extraordinary this is. We have 400 pages of a report that was — if you read the Special Counsel rules that our friend Neal Katyal helped draft, they say that the Special Counsel should submit a very brief report to the President on prosecution and declination decisions and that was never envisioned to be made public. As a matter of fact, the commentary on the rules that was published in the Federal Register at the time, is the problem with Ken Starr and the Counsel is that they were required to submit a public report and it tended to make investigations drag on. I think the word they used in the commentary was it made prosecutors overzealous. Clearly, Mueller’s people wrote this with the understanding that it was going to become public. It really is very surprising how much we’re seeing here.”
President Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow tells NBC News why he believes Mueller did not make an obstruction conclusion:
“They had the insufficiency of the evidence that they had could not meet the standard necessary to make the obstruction charge.”
For more on Sekulow’s interview, watch it here.
Meet the Press moderator and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd on whether this is a win for the President:
“No, I don’t think it’s a clean win, but the waters were muddy before, and I think it certainly isn’t going to, I think, change the larger sort of parameters of the political debate about Russian interference and all of this…I want to go to the Russian part of this because when you read, and this is where the Attorney General really overly glossed over and if anything, I think, warped the view of the report, and that is on the Russian interference aspect of it, essentially Bob Mueller proves that the Trump campaign was cheerleading Russia, was well aware of what they were doing, was hoping it would be as effective as it turned out to be.
They just couldn’t prove that they helped the Russians do this, that they were part of it, they were sort of cheerleading it. And this is why I wish all of us would take a step back at every elected official, which is the fact that the president and all of his allies are going no collusion, this is great, and not upset at the morality of an American presidential campaign cheering for an interference.”
TODAY Co-Anchor and NBC News Chief Legal Correspondent Savannah Guthrie on the Mueller Report:
“It is such a challenge. On behalf of our viewers, I wish that we had a little more clarity, because I myself sitting here have heard a lot of different answers with regard to one big issue…which is did Robert Mueller not ultimately charge an obstruction crime because the Department of Justice says he cannot indict a sitting president or not? Barr says his own analysis on that issue had nothing to do with that constitutional question — about whether a president can be indicted — and had everything to do with the facts not being sufficient to establish obstruction of justice. So that is Barr. But what about Robert Mueller?…”
Also joining the second NBC News Special Report:
- Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent, from the Department of Justice.
- Chuck Todd, moderator of Meet the Press and NBC News political director, from Washington, D.C.
- Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs correspondent, from Washington, D.C.
- Kasie Hunt, NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent
- Danny Cevallos, NBC News legal analyst
- Neal Katyal, NBC News contributor and former U.S. Acting Solicitor General
